Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilivolcanoniosis. Huh? What?

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilivolcanoniosis – believe it or not is a word. No, I’m not making this up. The longest word recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary, it is a lung disease caused by inhaling volcanic silicon dust.

I came across this and some other interesting facts about language in the trivia section the Discover magazine throws in towards the end. I also learnt that due to the placement of our voice box we cannot breathe and swallow at the same time, but you already knew that. Babies however, can because the voice box doesn’t drop to wherever it needs to be until 9 months after we are born. Bet you don’t remember breathing and swallowing. Also because of where the voice box sits, we humans have a uniquely large resonating system.

Modern technology and no doubt our lack of time for everything has spilled into our language world too. We turned “bits of eight” into “bytes”, “modulate/demodulate” became “modem”. And guess what blog’s full name is? Web log. So correct English would be, I’m web logging not blogging. But I don’t have time to say web logging! Don’t you know about the oodles and oodles of work I have to do?

Anyway let’s not get sidetracked. Moving on, Mandarin has the most native speakers on the planet. This one, I was shocked.  Wouldn’t you think it would be English? There are 2.5 times more native Mandarin speakers than English. But 70% of the web is in English and the language most spoken online is also English. Spanish Silbo is a language, composed of whistling sounds! It has only 4 vowel and four consonant sounds! It’s audible for miles and resembles bird calls! No, really I’m not making this up.

Those of you who live in New York, have you seen the bird man? Maybe he speaks Spanish Silbo!

You remember those science words back in school? Algebra, Alkaline and the one I hated the most – algorithm. Those were all loaned to English by Arabic, in which the prefix al means “the”. So thegebra, thekaline and thegorithm? Senseless but none of that made sense anyway, especially thegorithm.

There are about 6,800 spoken languages in the world and more than 1/3^rd of them (i.e. 2,266.666667) are in danger of becoming silent. We humans are a piece of work; because of us even languages are endangered! UNESCO says about 200 tongues now have fewer than 10 surviving speakers.  (If you don't have anything to do and want to sound smarter to your friends, there is more trivia here.)